But He Stayed in the City

I gather Ms. Chua is a total bitch with her children, making them
finish homework before it's assigned, practice violin and piano 25 hours
a day, maintain a grade point average higher than Obama budget numbers,
and forbidding them from doing anything they might enjoy, such as
exhale.

But being a male parent with a typical dad-like involvement in my
children's lives--I know all of their names--I thought Battle
Hymn was great. That is, I thought it made me look great.
Not that I read the dreadful book, but I did buy each of my children a
copy and inscribed it, "So you think you've got it bad?" What
with three editions lying around because my kids would rather fool with
the Wii than read, I admit I gave in to the temptation to skim.

Congress has again failed to rid a temporary spending bill of language
forcing NASA to waste $1.4 million a day on its defunct Constellation
moon program.

The original culprit is a Republican, Senator Shelby of Alabama.
But he has way too many co-conspirators.

In related news, the great Kevin Williamson opines
on the tax code that has me writing that DBC mentioned above, while
(as a recent New York Times story revealed)
the General Electric corporation managed to pay zippo. Nada. Squat.

I'm the farthest thing imaginable from an eat-the-rich populist,
but c'mon. Williamson's conclusion:

The upside of the fiscal crisis that our country insists on
marching toward is that it will give us the opportunity to enact
radical reform of some of our most important institutions, and
the tax code should be high on the list. A federal/state/local
system that produces a $3.2 billion tax benefit for G.E. but
taxes the pants off of poor people to fund useless schools that
do their children very little good (and a great measure of harm,
in many cases) is an unbearable burden. It has to go.

That should be cut out and stuck to your refrigerator door. And
also to the foreheads of every Senator and CongressCritter.

If you never heard about the GE tax thing, by the way, it's probably because
your TV is stuck on stupidNBC
News. You should get that fixed.

The Spirit Level Delusion

A bit of explanation first:

I saw this book by Christopher Snowdon
favorably mentioned out there in one of the right-wing fever
swamps that I routinely visit. Since I knew that the library of the
University Near Here owned The Spirit Level (TSL from here
on), I suggested via
their online form that they pick this up as well. In order, primarily,
to give our local scholars a shot at seeing both sides of the inequality
debate.

Somewhat surprisingly, the library purchased it at my suggestion.
So I felt obligated to also read TSL
(which I would not ordinarily have bothered to do); if you missed
them, my TSL comments are here.
Summary: I wasn't impressed. Although I read Snowdon's book in parallel
with TSL, I tried to restrict myself to criticisms
I came up with independently.

Snowdon's book deals primarily with fact-checking (and mostly refuting)
many of TSL's arguments, although other works in
the same genre with similar theses are mentioned. Snowdon accuses TSL authors, Wilkinson and Pickett,
of assuming their conclusion (inequality causes
all sorts of bad stuff), then cherry-picking data that seem
to bear that out.

For example: when doing comparisons and correlations between "rich" nations,
Wilkinson and Pickett include Portugal (which isn't particularly rich),
but exclude Slovenia, Hong Kong, and Singapore (which are). Their
justification seems weak, and it just so happens that different
selections of countries can weaken or eliminate
a number of TSL's strong correlations between inequality and
various dysfunctions.

Similarly, in some cases, so-called "outliers" cause TSL
to conclude cause-and-effect. They graph homicide rate vs. inequality
and (no surprise), they spy a strong correlation. But this conclusion
relies heavily on the inclusion of Portugal and (unfortunately) the USA.
If you remove these two countries from the mix, the correlation
goes away, as does TSL's conclusion. It's not robust.

Some of the refutations don't require any heavy statistical lifting
whatsoever. For example, TSL correlated inequality
against the percentage of waste recycled; they use the resulting
regression
line to "demonstrate" that more-equal societies are more civic-minded.

But Snowdon argues (convincingly) that this just shows there are
two kinds of countries: those whose governments have set up
mandatory recycling laws, and those who haven't. People
aren't recycling more because they look around and don't see
a lot of income disparities; they recycle more because
they get fined if they get caught doing otherwise.

So I had a higher opinion of Snowdon's book than TSL, not
surprising given my general ideological slant. Readers should feel
free to make up their own minds, not that readers need me to tell them
to do that. If you don't want to shell out the bucks for one or both
books, you can get the flavor of the (ongoing) argument from duelling
websites: The Equality Trust from
Wilkinson/Pickett, and The Spirit Level
Delusion from Snowdown. Particularly interesting is Snowdon's
"Chapter 10", a freely-available PDF
addon to this book, a discussion of Wilkinson and Pickett's response
to criticisms of TSL.

Murder, My Sweet

Although I've been a Raymond Chandler fan since I was a kid, I've
been hit-or-miss on seeing movies based on his works. This 1944 effort
stars Dick Powell as Chandler's classic private eye character, Philip Marlowe.

The action starts when Moose Malloy, a dumb hulk just out of the
slammer, engages Marlowe to look for his pre-imprisonment sweetie,
Velma. An initial foray into the bar where Velma used to work ends
badly, but Marlowe tracks down the widow of the bar's previous
owner, who clearly has something to hide.

Seemingly (but of course, totally un-) coincidentally, a fop named
Mariott hires
Marlowe to accompany him on a payoff, attempting to buy back some
stolen jewelry for a lady friend. This also goes poorly, with
Marlowe getting knocked out and Mariott winding up dead.
Marlowe needs to solve this murder in order to avoid taking the
fall himself.

The plot is twisty, straying quite a bit from what I remember of the
book.
Dick Powell is pretty good with Chandlerian narrative. Example:
"It was a nice little front yard. Cozy, okay for the average family.
Only you'd need a compass to go to the mailbox. The house was all right,
too, but it wasn't as big as Buckingham Palace." Ah, I love that stuff.

But Marlowe
always struck me as an unflappable sort; Powell is too often flapped.

I caught something amusing at Amazon: Murder, My Sweet
is currently #31 on their bestselling list of "Child
Safety & First Aid" DVDs. (It's got a way to go before
beating On The Town with Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly, which is
#5 as I type.) Gee, I think some self-amused Amazonian might be gaming
that list…

Disclaimers:
Unquoted opinions expressed herein are solely those of the
blogger.

Pun Salad is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates
Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a
means for the blogger to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.